Decanting
by B. Garden
Zine #57—September 2026
Listen along on the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast
Sommaliers, snitches, stasis, and spaceships.
Marcus stared at the yeasty dregs at the bottom of the otherwise empty plastic bucket, tearing at a flake of dry skin on his lower lip with his teeth. A bit of blood trickled out of the scraggly flesh, mixing with his saliva. He swallowed. Perhaps the alcohol in his blood would recycle itself.
He closed his eyes, imagining his body was the colony ship that had been his home for the last decade and change, and his veins were the great branching pipes of the nutrient reclamation system. He hoped this one leak would allow enough ethanol to cycle its way through his brain to let him fall back the fuck to sleep.
There had to be some sort of holy metaphor there, him willing his blood to be wine. He hoped for something powerful and nuanced, like an Amarone della Valpolicella, but he would have settled for some artless Napa Cabernet. Hell, he would have settled for more bucket beer.
But there was no burn in his throat, no giddy warmth spreading from his stomach. None of that velvet viscosity, that heady minerality, the spice of oak. Just the metallic, salty tang of his own diminished vitality. The bucket stared back at him without sympathy.
“Fuck you,” he said, kicking the bucket across his room. It bounced off the near bulkhead, rattling indignantly.
In the dim indigo light of the ship’s simulated night, he pulled an identical bucket from one of the cabinets under his bunk, this one still capped with its makeshift water lock. He was tempted to peek at the contents, take a whiff, gauge its development. Maybe the batch was ready, or close enough that a mouthful or two would collectively have the potency of a sip of the good stuff. The ready stuff. The stuff he nurtured from his own body—or more accurately, starved himself to feed—crumbling his own glucose-rich rations into, nursing to life as his own flesh melted off his body. Even after that, it was a pathetic imitation of the liquid bounty the Owners had entrusted to him.
There was also a chance that if he cracked this bucket early, he would introduce some spore, the seed of some mold that for reasons beyond his understanding, wasn’t entirely possible to scrub out of the ship’s air. Just one spore could ruin the batch before the pH got to the right place. Not that he wouldn’t drink it at that point. Maybe even moldy hooch would have a high enough ABV for the alcohol to seep into his bloodstream before he puked it all out.
There was a time when he could have brought such spoiled hooch to the team in water reclamation, could have bartered a share of the product for a spin on their makeshift still. They’d have shot the shit, played a hand of cards, compared tasting notes. The top notes of the distillate would likely sing of mildew, like a wet towel left balled up on the floor for a week despite the laundry chute being three paces away.
But it wouldn’t kill him.
That was all moot, though. The water team didn’t look him in the eye anymore. Hadn’t even given him a chance to explain.
Marcus crawled back into his bunk, sweating despite the entirely agreeable climate of his recently upgraded quarters. He clenched his eyes shut, willing sleep to come. Instead, he tossed and turned in his bunk as the sweats melted into shakes.
Maybe it would have been better to have been sent back into stasis with Daphne. At least then he would be able to get some fucking sleep.
Two conversations took turns replaying themselves in Marcus’s head anytime he wasn’t too distracted by work or drunk to fight them off. One conversation had been with Daphne, the other Sommelier on the ship, who Marcus considered to be his closest friend. Although Daphne had seemed to be friends with, well, everyone. The Owners had mentioned how dangerous people like that could be.
“When it runs out, and it will run out,” Daphne had said, holding her mug in her fist, gripping its handle like a lifeline. “What then, Marcus?”
“You’re talking decades from now,” said Marcus, sucking beer foam from his moustache. It was rich and heady, and drank like what it was, which was a fermented, unfiltered mash of lightly oven-toasted nutrient bars flavored with pilfered herb trim. A gift to the Cellar staff from the gardeners in Organics. Or a bribe. Same same. “Maybe even centuries, once the Owners get wise and stop having their big parties once a week. I don’t see what the rush is.”
“The rush,” said Daphne, “Is that people are being put back to sleep now. You don’t see the Owners going back into stasis to wait out the hydroponic blight. You don’t see them pulling their own reproductive permits. No, they put half of Organics back into the cans as punishment, and are asking for ‘volunteers’ from the rest of the teams.”
The faces of the few members of the Organics team who Marcus had befriended flashed through his head.
“This is good,” said Marcus, taking another sip of the beer, trying to blink away the faces. “They really got close to a hoppy flavor with the herbs. What is that?”
“Tarragon, I think,” said Daphne. “Maybe some coriander.”
Silence stretched for a few moments. Condensation gathered on the mugs.
“I just…I don’t see it as a punishment,” said Marcus, staring into the dissipating foam of his beer. “If half of the gardens are going to be out of commission for a year or more, why keep feeding a full staff?”
“Can’t you see the bigger implication? If we let them just put us to sleep whenever they feel like it, how do we know what the ship will be like when they decide to wake us back up. They’re free to wander space and survey planets in luxury as we either rot in stasis or do their chores. We’re just tools to be put into storage when we’re no longer useful, only to be awoken amongst strangers in years, decades, god forbid, centuries later...”
“It’s their ship,” said Marcus, shrugging, and taking a large sip from his mug. “We didn’t have to come aboard.”
For just a moment, the sheer incredulity on Daphne’s face stung. It wasn’t Marcus’s intention to frustrate her, but she kept bringing this conversation up, and he was just so very disinterested in anything that distracted him from his day-to-day responsibilities. He liked his job, he liked its privileges. He liked seeing the satisfaction on the Owners’ faces when they cracked into a new bottle and it was perfect.
And he hadn’t yet tasted everything in the cellar. Every time they opened a bottle, Daphne and Marcus were obliged a taste to ensure its quality. Just a sip. But it was enough for Marcus to aerate between his teeth, letting each molecule linger on his palate for as long as possible.
Oh, he couldn’t give that up. There was so much more to taste.
Daphne turned her shoulders in her chair, as if trying to make herself seem smaller. She formed her response carefully, chewing and swallowing half the words before speaking. “So…are you saying we could have stayed on Earth?”
“Of course not,” he said chuckling, hoping the sound would cut the tension in the conversation. It didn’t seem to work. “But we signed the contracts. We knew the terms. We picked the colony ship run like a great floating Michelin star.”
“Sure,” said Daphne, sighing. “But there’s kind of an imbalance there. You see that, right? If the choice was between signing a contract and being left on Earth, it’s not much of a choice, is it?”
“I suppose,” he said. “But a lot of people stayed anyway. Like. A lot.”
For a long moment she looked over his shoulder, as if trying to gauge the distance between where they sat now and some other far-off point. Then she shook her head, and smiled. “Look, I’m hardly even asking you to do anything. I’ve been chatting with Davis in Water Reclamation, those guys are putting together a plan to get us all a seat at the table. You can wash your hands of it if things go sour.” She reached out, her warm, slender fingers draping themselves on the hand he had curled around his beer mug.
“You’re asking me to show you how to destroy our life’s work,” he said.
She shook her head more fervently. “Not destroy, no. It won’t come to that. They have something we want, and we will have something they want. It’d be a trade. Fair commerce. Like you’re always talking about. Just show me how to program this contingency into the cellar’s control computer, and that’s all that will ever happen. A few lines of code. A bartering chip.”
Marcus went to finish his beer, gently releasing his hand from Daphne’s grasp. But he found the mug empty already. He shook it above his lips, trying to drain the last few yeasty drops down the walls, capture them on his tongue, give his senses anything else to think about other than the quickly cooling spot on his hand where Daphne’s hand no longer was.
“Think about it?” she said, smiling at him once he set the mug back down. It was his turn to look off behind her.
“I’ll think about it.”
Marcus had no idea how he had made it to the infirmary. But there he was, shaking face down on the floor, the aroma of his own briny sweat mixing with the astringent, ammoniac tang of whatever had been used to clean the tile. The smell reminded him of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. He dry heaved, but there was nothing in his stomach to release.
When had his drinking gotten this bad? He’d never drank for the buzz before, had never hesitated to spit out a mouthful of wine once he had gotten his fill of its flavors. Then all of a sudden, flavor was secondary. Nothing tasted good anymore, not without someone else to tell about it. Primary had become the burn, the buzz, and the bliss. He wanted Daphne back so badly.
“Evening, Marcus,” came a voice from far, far above him. “How can I help you?”
Marcus rolled onto his side, peering up at Dolores, the night medic. She was haloed by an LED light, the beams of which split into angry spears through the prisms of his tear filled eyes, stabbing at his optical nerve.
“I’ve got the flu,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” said Dolores. “Twice in one month. That’s unlucky. You washing your hands enough?”
“Give me something so I can sleep. Please. And a ration card.”
“So you can eat the rations, or ferment them?”
“Please.”
“Listen, my records are audited. You know this. I will have to refer you to psych if I find you like this again.”
“No,” was all Marcus could say.
“Why don’t you just ask them for rations. Maybe they’ll finally invite you to actually sit with them at dinner.”
Marcus wanted to scream at her. He had already asked the Owners for an advance on ration cards. Twice. The first time, they had been more than happy to oblige. The second time they had obliged as well, but their eyes had narrowed in a way that had made his blood go cold.
Then his quivering hands had spilled a drop of Saint Emillion on the tablecloth a few nights ago. The look the Owner shot at him had melted a hole in his bowels.
Then there’d been talk of decanting an assistant for him. Waking someone early for Marcus to train, someone from the reserves, someone who’d been asleep for the whole trip so far. He would have been fine if they would have just woken up Daphne again, but he had no clue how to even begin bringing that up.
“This isn’t right,” said Marcus.
“What isn’t?” asked Dolores, leaning down to feel his forehead. She was an older woman. Matronly. Her bedside manner had always alternated between chiding and caring. Marcus imagined that if she could have, she would have given each of her patients a lollipop.
“You. Punishing me too. I thought Doctors had to take an oath. Do no harm.”
“First off, that’s not how any of this works. And I’m a nurse practitioner. The Doctors all serve the Owners. Second, I’m not punishing you. You seem to be taking good care of that yourself. I do, however, have to find a balance between treating your…illness…and enabling future self-harm.”
“I. Have. The. Flu.” said Marcus, his teeth chattering, feeling cords of anger tie knots in his face.
“Okay. Come come. Sit up here, and we’ll get you some IV fluids and an anti-emetic.”
“And a sedative,” he said, his face softening. He swallowed a sob, preparing himself to look Dolores in the eye, to see disdain there, or worse, pity.
Instead, when they made eye contact, he saw something else. Something familial, something between understanding and a desire to be understood.
“Please,” he said, “I just want to sleep.”
“We’ll see,” said Dolores, putting her surprisingly strong arms under his elbows and lifting Marcus to his feet.
The other conversation that plagued him, the one with the Owner, had been much less direct. He couldn’t even keep track of half the words, much less their implications, especially after most of a bottle of lush, creamy Chablis. Every time Marcus had taken a sip, the Owner had immediately brought the level of wine back up to where it was before. Like an unspoken promise.
One that Marcus liked the look of.
His mind had been made for sensation, not negotiation. He could glance at the label of a bottle and immediately know where he had been the first time he had tasted the varietal, the château, even the vintage. He could walk into a room and know whether or not it was the right climate for wine storage; he could touch the amber glass of a bottle and know if the wine inside was the perfect drinking temperature.
But when someone in a position of authority asked him a round-about, open-ended question like, “How have things been going with Daphne?” or “Do you think you could manage a few more responsibilities?” he was sure his facial expressions answered the questions before his words could even catch up.
Marcus’s mouth had been so dry. He tried not to drink his wine too quickly. Yet he couldn’t seem to get his senses entirely around the flavor of it.
“If I can be blunt, Marcus,” said the Owner, leaning across the polished cherrywood table, grinning with terrifying geniality. Behind him, a pair of uniformed security officers stood at attention, flanking the door that went inwards towards the Owner’s section of the ship. Their presence gave even more weight to each of the Owner’s words. “Some ideas are like cancer. You can pre-screen, limit exposure to volatile compounds, encourage healthy growth. But it’s almost inevitable, given enough time, for things to spontaneously grow even in the healthiest cells. Do you know what I mean?”
Marcus wasn’t sure how to answer. Yes, he at least mostly understood what the Owner meant. Whole bottles of wine could go bad from the smallest defect in a seemingly sound cork. But he didn’t agree with the full extent of the metaphor, didn’t enjoy the turn the conversation was taking.
Marcus had thought the meeting would be more social. Or at least more positive. But the owner was clearly unhappy about something, and Marcus wanted desperately for at least that something to not be him. One of the security officers scratched at his face, and then went back to staring off into the distance.
“Yes sir,” he said, trying to smile, eyes flashing between the Owner’s gaze, the security guard, and the glass of wine. Maybe one more sip would settle his nerves. Help him think clearly. But was it still too soon since his last sip?
“Good,” said the Owner. “And you seem pretty healthy yourself.”
“Thank you, sir.” Marcus relaxed. Not reaching for the glass was obviously the right choice. He would let it wait a few moments longer. Prove his health. That was what the conversation was about, right? His health?
Marcus thought about the code he had written, but not yet shared with Daphne. The two sworn enemies of wine storage: heat and oxygen. Lock the doors. Vent the inert gasses in the storage chambers. Raise the temperature of the cellar. Cook all the wine to death. Then he shoved the thought out of his head, worried the Owner could read it through his eyes.
“So,” said the Owner, pouring another few ounces of wine into Marcus’s glass, before raising his own glass to toast. “Do we understand each other?”
Marcus still wasn’t sure.
Of course in retrospect it all made a lot more sense. Marcus would have handled things differently, had he known the actual consequences. And every time he replayed this conversation, he yelled back in time at himself. Gnashed his teeth.
In the moment, however, he had been close to drunk, and definitely needed time to parse out what he had actually agreed to. But the Owner’s wine glass hung there. Waiting for his answer, the only answer he would accept.
“Yes,” said Marcus, clinking his glass against the Owner’s.
“Wonderful,” said the Owner. He turned and nodded at the security officers. They nodded back, and soon enough the three of them had disappeared through the door behind the table.
Marcus was left at the table with the rest of the bottle and his own thoughts. He hardly tasted the wine. And then it was gone.
Once the sedative wore off, Marcus had meant to stay sober. He took the bucket of half-brewed hooch to the team in water reclamation. Maybe as a peace offering. Maybe because he wanted someone to get drunk on it, if he couldn’t.
“I’m off the sauce,” he said, standing in the doorway to their cramped offices. Four people in worn jumpsuits sat around an overturned aluminum crate. He had interrupted a card game, although the apprehension in their eyes suggested he had also interrupted something else, something more private and personal. The air smelled of chlorine and ozone, and oddly like Fino Sherry. He set the bucket down on the floor, feeling it slosh around in protest. “It needs another week or so to ferment, but then it should be good. Nothing wrong with it.”
“Nothing wrong with it, huh?” asked Davis, the head of water reclamation, rolling his eyes. “Sure.”
“Seriously,” said Marcus. “I just don’t want it to go to waste.”
“You could have just dumped it down your shitter, Marcus. It would have gotten to us faster. But thanks for giving us your trash to throw away.”
Marcus frowned and swallowed, resisting the urge to kick the bucket over, letting its ripe, warm, burp-smelling contents spill all over their nice clean floor. Ruin their night, the way his nights had been ruined for weeks.
He was feeling very thirsty at that moment. He also felt like he was about to cry. He wondered if he would ever get the liquid forces of his body back into equilibrium.
Marcus scanned the four workers at the makeshift table. Davis frowned, maintaining eye contact. He’d always been a tight ass.
But Samira, who had sewn patches onto the elbows of Marcus’s uniform, who had gladly accepted a fifteen-minute hot water token as trade for the work because it was all Marcus had, pursed her lips, glancing at her colleagues, before glancing back at Marcus.
“You can leave the bucket, Marcus. Good luck staying on the wagon.”
“Thanks,” he said, struggling to find anything else to say. “Good luck to you all, too, I guess.”
Looks of confusion and incredulity sprouted on the faces of the water team. He turned and walked away before they could yell at him more.
He understood that people hated him. That was easy to understand. He hated himself plenty. But he wished he could show them it hadn’t been entirely on purpose. He hadn’t ratted on her like everyone said; it was inaction rather than action that had gotten Daphne back to stasis. She had been his friend, too. He would have done things differently if he had only been given a second chance.
There just wasn’t a lot in his control anymore. But he did control whether or not he screamed and cursed at the little water supply clique, whether or not he flipped their silly little table and ruined their stupid little game. Whether or not he drank.
The other thing he controlled was the cellar.
The cellar’s airtight doors hissed as they closed. He walked through the vaults, the rows of shelves hexagonally slotted like honeycomb. Here was Burgundy. There was Champagne. A few rows down, Willamette Valley. Looking at the labels on the little cubby holes, he felt his neurons firing, bringing flavors back.
He had really wanted to stay sober. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the conversations. Couldn’t stop thinking about what he should have done for Daphne, about what he should have said to the Owner.
The one thing sobriety had offered him was the clarity of mind to finally accept that those specific chances had lapsed. No way to claw his way back through time to change them.
However, he also had the clarity to acknowledge there were new chances ahead. What was the saying? God closes a window, but opens a door? Or was it the other way around?
He’d never really believed in God, and the ship didn’t have much as far as windows went. And even back on Earth, he hadn’t really thought of the two as interchangeable methods of egress.
But the cellar had a lot of little doors. And Marcus had the keys.
He typed in a selection in the cellar wall. A green LED light down in the Rhone section flashed in the slot he had selected. He walked down the corridor, whistling merrily in time to the flashing of the light.
He knew the flashing light corresponded to a wall of LEDs in the Owner’s lounge. They had made a miniature model of the cellar to keep track of their hoard. Soon it would be lighting up like a star map.
Marcus had always found it difficult to communicate with people. Words were a hindrance. He had always wished he could bottle his thoughts and pour them out for others to experience in their full depth.
So sure, he could have written a demand letter. But he was pretty sure the Owners would get the gist quickly.
The glass door over the hexagonal cubby swung open at his touch, the inert gasses inside meant to halt the aging process whispering out into the oxygen-rich ship air. He pulled out a wine whose allure had always evaded him: 2057, Chateau Rayas Chateauneuf du Pape. One of the last good vintages before the hot summers really overripened the grapes in the Rhone Valley. He teased out the cork, cooing at the wine like a proud mother as he cradled the bottle in his arm, being sure not to disturb any of the sediment inside.
Then he poured himself a glass.
He swirled, he sniffed, he sighed, and then he sipped. Red and black cherries, truffles, licorice, and a whisper of smoky cloves. It was good, but it didn’t excite him. Didn’t pull him along its silky-smooth texture into a swirling pool of ecstasy. Nothing to write home about. Nothing to whisper about with Daphne over a mug of beer. It almost didn’t even hurt to dump this one down the recycler.
His heart was giddy, though. He whistled his way down the aisle, typed another selection in the computer, followed another flashing light deeper into the cellar. Champagne. Silly that he hadn’t started with it. Daphne would have scolded him. Something as muscular and brutish as Chateauneuf du Pape before Champagne? A sin.
He practiced his conversation with Daphne as he wandered down the aisle.
“You were right,” he said, over and over again. “I’m sorry, and you were right.” In his mind’s eye, Daphne smiled and waved off the apology.
He smiled back, as he plucked out a bottle of elegant grower Champagne, Blanc des Noirs, 2066. Why not commit another wine sin while he was at it? He shook up the bottle before popping the cork, allowing the foam to spray around the cellar, trying to catch some of it in the glass, before laughing, giving up, and drinking directly from the neck.
This one was special. Meyer lemon, brioche, marzipan. A bit of a floral spice on the long finish. Something sank in his gut as he dumped it down the drain. But it was for a good cause.
He danced around the cellar, tasting new world and old world bottles alike, whistling as a flush crept into his cheeks and a fire warmed his stomach. Everything was going to be okay. It had to be.
He took a break from drinking to make sure everything was sound within the cellar’s climate control module. Found the two lines of code he’d nestled in there.
“You’re gonna love this,” he said, giggling as he programmed the passkey for the stop-command. It was the name and vintage of the first bottle they drank together, back on Earth. They had met at Daphne’s wine bar, or what remained of it after it had closed its doors due to the mortgage crisis. The bottles all technically belonged to the bank. But the repossession was still a few weeks away. So, why not dig into the cellar? Celebrate a little.
He’d leave her a note, make sure she found it in case the Owners put him back to sleep before they woke her up. He stumbled over to the little office nook in the cellar. That’s when he heard the knocking.
“Marcus,” came the muffled voice from the other side of the cellar door. “What are you doing, Marcus?”
An Owner had come at last.
“Open the door.” A simple command. From a voice that brokered no disobedience. Even now, the sound made every muscle in his body tense. He found himself badly needing to piss.
Instead, he smiled. This wasn’t his problem anymore. Or, almost wasn’t. Marcus waved through the porthole in the door, holding up one finger and mouthing one moment.
He found the cellar whiteboard where he and Daphne had often left little notes for each other.
I’m sorry, he wrote. You were right. Remember the first bottle we shared?
There was an angry mechanical sound behind him. Gears being forced to do things they didn’t want to. Marcus turned on his heel, the movement sending the room wobbling back and forth.
Two security officers tramped towards him, in full riot gear, brandishing stun guns. The Owner was a few paces behind them.
“Oh my god,” he said, looking at all of the empty bottles strewn across the floor. “I don’t have time for this shit, Marcus.”
Marcus smiled, and squared his shoulders. “Well. We should talk when you do have time.”
“Are you serious?” asked the Owner, his eyes red with some combination of fatigue and fury. “Did you coordinate with them? With those bastards in Water Treatment?”
A garbled voice chirped from the radios on the security officer’s hips. Even through the static there was a frantic tone. Marcus thought he’d heard the word backup.
“Coordinate?” asked Marcus. His thoughts stuttered.
“God dammit,” said the Owner. “I do not have fucking time for this.” And then he gestured his hands towards the guards. A little brushing movement with his fingers.
The guards started towards Marcus, the tasers crackling to life.
“Wait,” said Marcus, holding up his hands. His brain was sluggish, spinning its wheels, trying to figure out how to explain, to tell them what would happen to the cellar if nobody entered the stop code. How to form it into a threat, a promise. How to tell them it would all be okay if they just woke up Daphne, and then listened to her. Listened to her like he hadn’t.
“Wait,” he said again.
They did not.
Marcus came to. He was in bed, covered in probes, an IV in his arm.
“Oh,” he said, trying to adjust his positioning in the cramped little capsule.
“Try not to wiggle,” said a masked stasis tech.
“Sorry,” said Marcus.
Shouts sounded in the distance. A scream. The crackling of tasers.
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” said the tech. She sounded tired. “All I know is that I’m going to be busy.”
“Waking people up or putting them to sleep?”
“Either,” said the tech, strapping a rubbery mask over Marcus’s mouth and nose. “Both. Who knows. Whatever. Breathe deep and count to ten, please.”
Marcus found himself grinning as the stasis fluid surrounded him. The anesthetic was acrid in the back of his throat, bitter.
It tasted like–
About the Author
B. Garden works as a general manager and beverage director at a small James Beard Nominated restaurant in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In their free time they enjoy baking sourdough bread, reading and writing dark fiction, taking deep breaths, and trying everything twice. They recently challenged God to a chili cook off, but have yet to hear back. You can rifle through their personal belongings at www.godcompost.com